The Limit

The CNN interview was vintage Bibi: his American-ness, his flair for the dramatic, his utility as a spokesman for Israeli hopes and fears, his ability with Western audiences. But these characteristics explain something else about him: They are also largely responsible for Netanyahu’s successful career in Israeli politics. He isn’t American-born, but he is, in many ways, American-made—the most American politician in the world outside the United States. And yet, despite this fact, he has had a rocky relationship with American presidents, very much including Bill Clinton. With Clinton’s wife the favorite to win November’s election and become the next U.S. president at a moment of great peril and great promise for Israel, Netanyahu’s four-decade history of political conflict with American administrations is worth study.

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enjamin Netanyahu is the first Israeli prime minister to have been born in the State of Israel. When he was eight years old, his academic father was offered a teaching job in New York and the family moved to Manhattan. Two years later, the family returned to Jerusalem. Three years after that, the Netanyahus returned to the States just outside Philadelphia, where Bibi went to high school.

Benjamin returned to Israel for his military service, and was recruited to join the same elite reconnaissance unit in which his brother Yonatan served. When he was released, Bibi moved to Boston with his first wife, Micki, and attended MIT. He fought with the IDF in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, returned to MIT to finish his studies, joining the Boston Consulting Group after college, and then took a position with the Israeli furniture company Rim in 1978.

In 1976, his brother Yonatan was killed during the raid on Entebbe Airport in which their unit, Sayeret Matkal, rescued 103 hostages. Yoni’s heroism electrified the nation, and even as Benjamin was learning the furniture business, he created an institute in his brother’s honor to study the threat of terrorism. The Jonathan Institute was inaugurated with an ambitious conference in 1979 featuring political dignitaries and politicians from around the world. The conference was a triumph and launched Benjamin’s political career.

In 1982, the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., began looking for a replacement for the outgoing political attaché, and Netanyahu got the job. The timing was propitious, because Israel would go to war in southern Lebanon that year and desperately needed any and all eloquent defenders of the country’s actions to speak to the foreign press.

Netanyahu studied hard. Every weekend, he and his second wife, Fleur, rented several TV cameras and a spotlight, and Fleur would practice grilling Bibi over the day’s news. They would run the tapes back like boxers or football coaches and then do another interview. “Compared to other diplomats, Bibi Netanyahu was like a breath of fresh air,” write Netanyahu biographers Ben Caspit and Ilan Kfir. “He spoke to the Americans in their own language, using expressions from the world of sports and the college campus. And he was always smiling.”

Netanyahu cultivated friendships with media executives and star anchors. He refined and beefed up the Israeli Embassy’s PR shop. And as the Reagan administration’s pressure on Prime Minister Menachem Begin increased, so did Bibi’s aggressive defense of Israel’s actions. One example: After one Israeli offensive, a picture began circulating in the media of a young injured Lebanese girl. Netanyahu could tell the picture was a forgery and investigated. He found the girl: Her injury had happened years earlier, during the Lebanese civil war. Netanyahu was spotting libels and had the standing and connections to debunk them, which took some pressure off Begin.

Netanyahu’s efforts, however, were not without missteps of a kind he would repeat. Moshe Arens, the ambassador, wanted Bibi on TV and in the press whenever possible. But Netanyahu got a bit too comfortable criticizing the Reagan administration for Arens’s taste, and he worried his superiors by going around Reagan to build support for Israel’s position among members of Congress—a practice that would come under scrutiny again when Bibi fought against the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran 33 years later.

As the Reagan administration’s pressure on Begin increased, so did Bibi’s aggressive defense of Israel. Netanyahu’s efforts, however, were not without missteps.

Netanyahu’s linguistic abilities helped in other ways, too. George P. Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state, remembers using him to convey messages to the Israeli government when precise wording—in Hebrew and English—was essential. On June 14, 1985, TWA Flight 847 was hijacked by terrorists whose demands included Israel’s releasing Shiite prisoners. As Shultz writes in his memoir, the Reagan administration didn’t want to be seen trading prisoners with terrorists, and U.S. officials were even less comfortable asking Israel to do so. But still, the “trade” would have to be done, somehow. Shultz writes that “precision” was his “guideline.” He contacted Netanyahu and phrased the question to be relayed to Prime Minister Shimon Peres thus: “What can we expect Israel to do about all the Ansar [Shiite] prisoners on the assumption that there are no TWA 847 hostages being held?”

The press oversimplified and misreported what was agreed to. Shultz again called Netanyahu to clear the air. Eventually the complex hostage crisis was resolved, but not before it gave another boost to Netanyahu’s dealings with America: the U.S. security establishment’s recognition that defeating terrorism would require a global effort that also targeted and pressured the terrorists’ state sponsors.

In truth, the seeds of anti-terrorism were planted earlier and cultivated by Netanyahu. In 1983, Shultz revealed to Netanyahu that he and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger were at odds over the value of a global war on terror; Shultz was in favor. Terrorism experts are a dime a dozen today, but in 1983 Netanyahu was one of the few, owing to his work with the Jonathan Institute. Netanyahu told Shultz terrorism could be defeated by resisting terrorists’ demands and by being ready to, as Caspit and Kfir put it, “fight countries which support and protect terrorism.”

Netanyahu organized a second conference, at which Shultz was one of the featured speakers. Two years later, during the negotiations over TWA 847, Shultz began winning his internal battle with Weinberger and was convincing Ronald Reagan that tougher action against terrorism was required. The National Security Council produced a timeline of steps to take against the terrorists. Among those steps was “declaring war on terrorism,” and another was, in Shultz’s words, expanding that fight to “any nation that used its state apparatus to support terrorism”—as Netanyahu had recommended to Shultz.

Netanyahu’s turn toward domestic politics happened prior to the 1988 Knesset elections, when he—by then a star of the right—joined the Likud slate. Arens became foreign minister and made Netanyahu a deputy, putting the band back together, this time to tackle the emerging Palestinian peace track. And there he was, back on American television screens.

“Why, though, is having this state of almost civil war any better than having a Palestinian entity on your border, where they’re involved with organizing their own community?” Lesley Stahl asked Netanyahu in 1988 on Face the Nation.

“Lesley,” he replied, “we’ve experienced what happened when these territories were in Arab hands, and in fact when the PLO was there in these very territories before the 1967 war. What they used it for is to launch a war of extermination against Israel.” Bibi closed his comments with a typical American flourish: “If you want to move toward peace, you’re going to wait a long time until this PLO leopard changes its spots.”

The U.S.-Israel relationship took a turn for the better under Reagan so significant that it counts as a realignment. That relationship took more than one or two steps back during the one term of Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush.

IN 1989, the Bush White House was trying to organize multiparty peace talks, but no one could seem to agree on who could or should represent the Palestinians at the table. When it finally looked as if the question had been satisfactorily answered, Secretary of State James Baker testified to the Senate that he supported conditioning U.S. loan guarantees to Israel on the latter’s willingness to freeze settlements. Two days later, President Bush criticized building Jewish housing in East Jerusalem. Just like that, the process was on ice.

Netanyahu publicly accused the Bush administration of dishonesty, and Baker banned him from his presence for the rest of the term. He seemed proud of his decision, too: “Even after [Netanyahu] wrote me claiming to have been misunderstood, I wouldn’t see him for the rest of my tenure, although I rescinded the ban against his seeing others in the building,” Baker writes in his memoirs. What Baker glosses over is how willing the White House was to facilitate the breakup of the governing coalition led by Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir and let the government fall in hopes of a more compliant Labor-led coalition.

The Bush administration was enraged by Shamir’s intractability as it began a peace process that was to be inaugurated with a conference in Madrid in 1991. Throughout the Madrid process, Netanyahu served as deputy foreign minister and was a point man at press conferences about the process. He was a fixture on American television, and his defense of his government’s refusal to bow to international demands infuriated Bush and Baker still more.

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n the wake of the Madrid process’s failure, the complex coalition led by the Likud government fell, which opened the space for Netanyahu to elbow his way to party leadership—just as Bill Clinton defeated Bush in the 1992 presidential election.

The retrospective irony of the 1992 election was that Netanyahu surely preferred Clinton to Bush. Indeed, Clinton later told historian Taylor Branch that he was certain Netanyahu wanted him to win. But Netanyahu’s preferences were of no moment. Yitzhak Rabin’s Labor Party won the new elections, and the peace process resumed. Bibi was relegated to the sidelines in the opposition. Clinton and Rabin ramped up the peace process, and the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993 on the White House lawn by Rabin and PLO chair Yasir Arafat—and when an assassin’s bullet killed Rabin in November 1995, Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, called early elections against Netanyahu’s Likud. And because Rabin had been murdered by a right-wing extremist, the Israeli and American left treated Netanyahu’s party as an accomplice.

The conventional wisdom about Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister is that he was uncooperative in advancing peace. This is impossible to square with the reality.

Washington sought unambiguously to ensure Peres’s victory in the 1996 elections. Peres was treated to a pre-election visit at the White House in which, in veteran peace processor Dennis Ross’s words, “we all but endorsed him.” On the eve of the election, Clinton gave a speech in which he appealed to Israeli voters essentially to choose Peres. The Clinton team’s justification for this was shocking: Martin Indyk, the U.S. ambassador to Israel who could not then and cannot now contain his anti-diplomatic loathing of Netanyahu, compared it to Clinton’s helping “[Boris] Yeltsin’s reelection bid in Russia”—as if a Labor loss was equivalent to Yeltsin’s losing power to revanchist Communist elements during Moscow’s post-Soviet transition to a fragile democracy.

It was a gamble the president lost when Netanyahu squeaked out a narrow victory. It is important to note that Bibi did not run on a platform or promise of undoing Oslo, but he expressed profound skepticism about Yasir Arafat’s true intentions. The conventional wisdom about Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 is that he was obstinate and uncooperative in advancing peace. This is impossible to square with the reality.

Netanyahu is no right-wing ideologue, and both Clinton and Dennis Ross, who took the lead on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, understood this. Clinton’s dislike of Netanyahu once in office largely stemmed from Bibi’s propensity to lecture. After their first meeting, Clinton said, “He thinks he is the superpower and we are here to do whatever he requires.”

But in terms of policy, Netanyahu is a pragmatist, which Clinton recognized. Bibi (in Branch’s paraphrasing) “wanted badly to maneuver against ‘crazies’ within his own coalition,” Clinton told Branch. “Netanyahu complained constantly that General Ariel Sharon forced his way into the cabinet, for instance, and had made nothing but trouble since, dreaming of an Israeli settlement on every corner in the West Bank.”

It is also true that Netanyahu repeatedly flattened himself into the caricature drawn of him. In return for restarting negotiations, Bibi wanted to throw a bone to his restive right flank. He did so by expanding Jewish building in Jerusalem and by opening the Hasmonean tunnel, an underground passageway that made it possible to enter the Kotel tunnel (underneath the Western Wall), walk through the Hasmonean tunnel, and exit in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. The Palestinians threw a fit, Clinton called a summit, and the pressure was back on Bibi to produce some positive step.

To do so, the parties turned to Hebron, an ancient Jewish holy city and the site of the Cave of the Patriarchs. It was also the major city in the West Bank from which the IDF had not yet redeployed to make way for Palestinian stewardship. At first, Netanyahu was almost too eager to make progress with the Palestinians. One of his weaknesses was showing through: He liked to alternate between placating his right wing and mollifying the peace camp. Thus he telegraphed his moves and thereby became easier for both sides to manipulate. When Arafat sensed Netanyahu needed to have something to show on the peace front, he would hold back.

One way Ross found to make progress was to have dual-track talks: a high-level, public channel and a back channel. When the back channel made enough progress, the Israeli and Palestinian leadership would take the baton. More than once Ross had to stop Netanyahu from trying to use his own cabinet’s pressure as a means of getting Arafat to move the ball forward; Ross understood Arafat had no intention of aiding Netanyahu domestically. The Palestinian sought only to take advantage of his rival’s perceived political weakness.

Ross and Netanyahu often disagreed on policy, but Netanyahu trusted Ross. He didn’t necessarily need like-minded counterparts in Washington, but he did need interlocutors who would be straight with him and hold up their end of any bargain. Americans have persistently misunderstood this because, unlike Ross, they do not try to understand the complexities of Israeli politics and instead insist on seeing it in the frame of our own. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state during Clinton’s second term, is a perfect example. Here is Albright’s description of Netanyahu upon taking office as secretary of state: “Pugnacious, partisan, and very smooth, he reminded me of Newt Gingrich.” Preposterously, she was determined to see him as a Republican instead of as the head of the party of a rambunctious democratic ally.

One of the most important things to understand about Bibi is that he fears the right wing precisely because he isn’t really one of them. In spirit and interest, he is far closer to the Labor elite whose political stance he admittedly reviles. And though he has been one of the two dominant figures on the Israeli right for the past quarter-century, he actually came to power twice by outmaneuvering the Likud Party “princes” (as they were called), who have remained thorns in his side forever. He doesn’t care nearly as much about satisfying the right wing as he does about silencing them. That is a big difference.

And it is a difference too many American officials have never grasped. When the Hebron negotiations hit a rough patch—Palestinian terrorism followed by Israeli construction—Albright apparently raised the astounding possibility of announcing publicly that the U.S. “could not work with” Netanyahu, according to Ross. Albright and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, Ross said, “feared that Bibi was deliberately trying to destroy the Oslo process.”

Instead of such histrionics, it would have been more useful for these foreign-policy experts to understand that when external events—terrorism on the one side, coalition maneuvering on the other—intrude, it’s a sign that those external forces should be dealt with. Indeed, this is what diplomats are supposed to understand about the countries they deal with; it’s why diplomats exist in the first place.

The United States should have known then and should know now that an Israeli prime minister must respond to acts of terrorism and cannot reward them with concessions; it is the sine qua non of leadership in Israel. And American officials should know that only by bringing pressure to bear on the Palestinians to halt terrorism and the incitement that drives the violence, can Israeli leaders have the freedom to move on the peace track.

Despite all this, Netanyahu and Arafat eventually came to agreements on Hebron in 1997 and 1998. And yet, when Netanyahu’s government started to fall apart in 1999, Team Clinton was gleeful. Clinton was angered when Netanyahu did not agree to new concessions at the Wye Plantation negotiations in 1998; Bibi told Clinton he needed a face-saving concession in the form of the release of the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, and Clinton could not assent.

New elections were called and Clinton once again put his thumb on the scales against Netanyahu. The administration didn’t even try to hide it, as this quote that one White House official gave to the New York Times revealed: “Officially, our position is that Israel is a sovereign country, we don’t meddle in its internal affairs, blah, blah, blah.” Three of Clinton’s top election strategists—Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, and Bob Shrum—went over to help Labor’s Ehud Barak win.

He did. But the intifada that erupted at the inevitable end of the Oslo process delivered the government back into Likud’s hands within two years. But not into Netanyahu’s. Chastened by his defeat, he took a brief pause from electoral politics and saw Ariel Sharon put down the intifada. He roared back into public life in opposition to Sharon’s plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and Sharon was forced to abandon Likud to form a new Kadima Party rather than be voted out of leadership. Netanyahu then took his party back.

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our years later, just as Barack Obama was getting settled into the White House in 2009, Likud lost national elections to Kadima. But Netanyahu outmaneuvered Kadima leader Tzipi Livni to form a governing coalition, and he was prime minister once again. To say this isn’t what Obama wanted would be the understatement of the new millennium. Since 2009, the Obama-Bibi relationship has been studied and discussed and analyzed to the point of exhaustion. Now the page is turning on Obama’s time, but not on his Israeli counterpart’s. What lessons can be drawn from the painful history of the most American of Israeli prime ministers and the hostility shown him by the American administrations he has dealt with as a leader?

The lesson for Netanyahu is to disabuse himself of the fantasy he can ever be enough of an expert on American politics to outwit the president on his or her home court. No Israeli—no foreign leader, for that matter—knows America the way Bibi does. But by definition, any American president has a better feel for the U.S. electorate and a superior understanding of the minutiae of political operation than virtually anyone else save his living predecessors.

Netanyahu’s repeated attempts to find leverage against Obama were understandable but in retrospect doomed to failure, as we saw in his effort to run rings around Obama on the Iran deal—specifically by addressing a joint session of Congress that took on Obama on his home turf and was aimed at turning members of Obama’s own party against him. That Netanyahu was right on the merits doesn’t mean he was right on the optics, and the whole business demonstrated not a deep understanding of American politics but an odd naiveté about the way things work here. Bibi is a parliamentary politician and he imagined he could use America’s parliament against Obama. But America doesn’t have a parliament.

The lesson for Obama’s successor is twofold. First make sure there is someone—anyone—high up in the administration who can serve as what might be called the “trust valve.” During Begin’s premiership, Netanyahu saw the acrimony that resulted from the various challenges to the relationship, especially the war in Lebanon. But what he also probably noticed was that while Reagan’s cabinet, especially in his first term, was ill-disposed toward Begin, Reagan himself was not.

Each time a crisis seemed to be developing, Begin found that Reagan listened to his side of the story and, at times, even instinctively trusted the Israeli over his own advisers. Reagan’s reservoir of sympathy for Israel was key to ensuring the relationship didn’t crash and burn after the war in Lebanon.

During Bill Clinton’s administration, the trust valve was Dennis Ross, with whom Netanyahu speaks freely. During the Obama administration, there was no such valve. Obama had no personal relationship with Netanyahu, and neither did his advisors. His Mideast envoy was Martin Indyk, who openly loathes Netanyahu. And Obama’s national-security aides constantly badmouthed the Israeli leader. One called him “a chickens–t” to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg; National Security Adviser Susan Rice talked to Anti-Defamation League leader Abe Foxman about Netanyahu’s supposed racism. Under Obama, there was nobody to talk to. There must be somebody to talk to.

The other major lesson is not to play into Netanyahu’s fears about foreign interference. Obama meddled throughout Bibi’s first term in his latest premiership, trying to destabilize the governing coalition and elevate Tzipi Livni in his place. Then he tried to ensure Netanyahu didn’t get a second consecutive term.

Obama unnecessarily put Netanyahu in impossible situations with his own coalition, for example by demanding an unprecedented settlement freeze that forbade building for “natural growth” and in Jerusalem. And Obama refused to put pressure on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to stop the officially sanctioned incitement that led to terror sprees and disempowered both leaders by making them subservient to events.

Trying to weaken the Israeli prime minister when he obviously needs broad public support to make sacrifices and concessions for peace is self-destructive. Doing so to Netanyahu, who has been the target of such rash behavior literally every time he has been elected prime minister and who is therefore both sensitive to it and adept at countering it, is a recipe for disaster.

If Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition hangs on and Hillary Clinton retains her lead in the polls and beats Donald Trump, it will be a testament to their survival instincts. They have been central players in the fates of their respective countries for decades. Let’s hope they’ve learned something.

Bibi-bashing of this sort is neither new nor limited to Israel. Diskin’s remarks echoed the charges of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who wrote in his 2014 memoir, Duty, that under Netanyahu “Israel’s strategic situation is worsening, its own actions contributing to its isolation.” Gates claimed that the Jewish state was acting “strategically stupid” as it pursued tactical gains. “Time,” he concluded, “is not on Israel’s side.”

Messianism and stupidity are as bad a combination as one could find in a nation’s leader. What, then, might Diskin and Gates have made of the accord Netanyahu reached with Turkey right around the time the Politico piece appeared? Six years after Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Israel and took to obsessively condemning the Jewish state, Netanyahu got Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to drop his key demands and agree to resume full diplomatic relations with Israel. That victory for Netanyahu’s statecraft is one example of many that highlight an enduring contradiction between his reputation for ineptitude and his record of achievement. And considering what Israel is up against, almost any foreign-policy success would be noteworthy.

Since Netanyahu regained the premiership in 2009, Israel has faced a multitude of challenges—from Turkey’s hostile turn, to Iran’s nuclear program, to Hamas’s cross-border tunnels, to rocket attacks on civilians, to a rash of terrorist knifings and automobile attacks. Any one of them would try the sharpest strategic thinkers. What’s more, Egypt and Syria both collapsed into turmoil during his time in office. The civil war in Syria turned Israel’s quietest border into an ungoverned zone filled by rival jihadist groups. The fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt meant that a Muslim Brotherhood government temporarily bordered the Gaza Strip and could give aid to its Palestinian faction, Hamas. And while Egypt’s current leader, Abdel-Fattah Al-Sissi has since fought Hamas aggressively, the Sinai Peninsula has become an ungoverned home to terrorists who pledge allegiance to ISIS.

Then there’s the United States. With the election of Barack Obama, America’s approach to the Middle East changed in drastic ways. Determined to build bridges to the Muslim world, Obama saw Israeli settlements as the central obstacle to peace with the Palestinians. Thus, he instituted a policy of maintaining “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem in hopes of wearing down Israel’s supposed obstinacy on settlements. To make matters worse, Obama and his advisers evinced a strong animus against Netanyahu that only escalated as time progressed. 

After the Mavi Marmara incident, the flotilla problem was expected to grow, but Israel used diplomacy, espionage, and other tools to nullify the threat.

Washington scaled back its influence at the same moment that Sunni–Shia, tribal, and ethnic battles began gutting Arab states. Iran capitalized on the resulting power vacuum to expand its reach in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. As for Iran’s nuclear program, Obama and the Islamic Republic entered into the P5+1 Joint Plan of Action. What’s become known simply as “the Iran deal” has both enriched and rehabilitated the regime while leaving its nuclear program largely intact and free from serious scrutiny.

How has Netanyahu handled this dizzying constellation of threats? Although far from perfect, he has shown himself to be a careful thinker, a leader whose reading of complex situations has allowed him to outmaneuver adversaries and protect Israel’s interests. The growing threat from Hamas and the dangers of a rising Iran have not abated. But in reviewing Netanyahu’s actions as prime minister, we emerge with a list of improbable foreign-policy accomplishments of which most world leaders would be proud.

The Border with Syria

Problems generated by the Syrian civil war have exploded outward in every direction. To name a few: Refugees have spilled over into Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Europe. Terrorist groups inside Syria, especially ISIS, pose a strategic threat to Iraq, Jordan, and Egypt. Additionally, ISIS continues to carry out major terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe.

Yet Israel, on Syria’s western border, remains effectively out of the fray.

Although Syria was long an enemy of Israel, its collapse posed a major strategic challenge for Israeli leaders. Before Syria spiraled out of control, Israel had hoped for (and repeatedly tried to attain) a peace agreement with Damascus. With the Syrian state in chaos, this was no longer even a remote possibility. And with ISIS taking the lead in the fight against Assad, it was clear that Israel couldn’t support either side. In any event, Israel had to deal with more immediate threats emerging from the meltdown. Some of the terrorist groups fighting Assad—including the Al-Nusra Front and the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade—had gained a foothold along Israel’s Golan Heights border with Syria.

There were (and are) still more complicating factors. Mortar fire from the conflict occasionally strays into Israel. Druze residents of the Israeli Golan Heights maintain close ties to family members and other co-religionists on the Syrian side and have vowed to take action if jihadist groups threaten Syrian Druze. And Hezbollah and Iran have tried to take advantage of the chaos to open a new front against Israel in the Golan.

Through it all, Israel has stayed safe. Netanyahu has been quietly shaping the situation to protect his country’s interests. Israel has reached a stable—and officially unconfirmed—understanding with rebel groups on its border. These groups, including some jihadist factions, know they don’t have to protect their western flank from Israel. In return, they refrain from attacking Israel and keep others from doing so as well. In coordination with IDF forces on the border, rebel groups hand over wounded fighters and civilians to be treated in Israeli hospitals. Israel has also transferred aid to these groups, but it is unclear if this goes beyond food and medicine. There is likely intelligence sharing as well.

Israel is also involved in protecting threatened Druze communities in Syria. “The State of Israel is acting on behalf of the Syrian Druze. These matters are being carried out quietly, and without publicity,” said Israeli Druze lawmaker Ayoub Kara in 2015. It’s not known whether this assistance includes a military component.

When Russian forces entered the fight in September 2015 in support of Assad, new difficulties arose. While Turkey made an enemy out of Putin by downing a Russian plane that had strayed toward its airspace, Israel refrained from firing on the two occasions Russian jets flew over Israel. Top-level Israeli military and political leaders coordinate with their Russian counterparts to make sure Israel and Russia don’t fire on each other.

Notably, however, Netanyahu has failed to convince the Russians to keep advanced missiles out of Hezbollah hands. Hezbollah and Iran are doing all they can to strengthen their posture against Israel while Syria bleeds. The advanced Russian weapons given to Hezbollah include anti-tank missiles, ground-to-ground rockets, and radar systems. Though Israel has not been able to stop Russian shipments to Iran and Syria, it has been bombing weapons convoys heading into Lebanon without inviting reprisals from Hezbollah, Syria, or Iran.

Israel’s air force also interfered with Hezbollah’s plan to threaten Israel from the Golan Heights. On January 18, 2015, Israeli jets struck a convoy moving through the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, killing six Hezbollah men and an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps general. One of the Hezbollah dead was the son of senior member Imad Mughniyeh. The convoy was reportedly part of a joint Iran/Hezbollah effort to develop a new unit that would kidnap Israelis, fire rockets, and attack soldiers. But Hezbollah made do with one attack on an IDF vehicle, killing an officer and a soldier. While Hezbollah continued to talk tough, that was the extent of its response.

Turkey

In May 2010, Israel committed what seemed to be a catastrophic blunder. As part of a campaign to weaken Israel’s blockade on Gaza, a Turkish NGO organized a flotilla in hopes of either reaching the coastal strip or forcing Israel into an embarrassing mistake. IDF naval commandoes succeeded in stopping the flotilla. But a group of activists on one ship, the Mavi Marmara, set upon the soldiers with stockpiled knives and pipes. In the ensuing struggle, nine Turkish activists were killed and ten Israeli commandoes wounded. World reaction came down hard. British Prime Minister David Cameron’s condemnation was emblematic: “Let me be clear: the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable.”

Relations with Turkey, already tense, deteriorated. Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador and recalled its own. It threatened to deploy its navy to accompany future flotillas and to prevent Israeli “exploitation” of natural gas in the Mediterranean. Both sides flexed their muscles, with Israeli jets allegedly approaching Turkish naval forces and Turkish ships sailing provocatively close to Israeli waters.

Yet after the Mavi Marmara incident, the flotilla problem, expected to get worse, dissipated. Under Netanyahu, Israel used diplomacy, espionage, and appeals to international law to nullify the threat. When the NGO organized another flotilla in 2011, it never got out of port. Israel managed to create deep and broad international opposition to the campaign. Parties ranging from the UN and the Middle East Quartet to France and Canada came out against the planned voyage. Even Turkey’s foreign minister said that organizers should reconsider their plans. The Obama administration reportedly tried to convince Turkey to stop the flotilla in exchange for a Middle East peace conference hosted by Ankara.

Other measures also had an effect. Some of the vessels were damaged in port (Israel denied involvement). The Greek government, in whose ports most of the ships were docked, forbade the ships from leaving. Some boats tested the ban and were arrested by Greek authorities. Israeli NGOs waged legal war against the flotilla, warning insurance companies that they could be held responsible for terrorist attacks involving any cargo carried by the ships.

Israel easily intercepted the one vessel that managed to sail toward its waters, with no violence or international opprobrium. A subsequent flotilla attempt in 2015 was also intercepted by Israel with no cost in blood or diplomatic standing. Israel even prepared flyers for the participants that read: “Perhaps you meant to sail somewhere else nearby—Syria, where Assad’s regime is massacring his people every day, with the support of the murderous Iranian regime.” Through it all, Israel never backed down from its red lines, showing that Jerusalem would enforce the blockade.

Netanyahu has since developed a strategic partnership with Turkey’s rivals, Greece and Cyprus. The relationship has led to massive Israeli and Cypriot natural-gas discoveries. A proposed “East Med Pipeline” would link Israel, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy, and the Bulgarian government has also thrown in its support. Not insignificantly, the project would bypass Turkey, foiling its ambitions to become the natural-gas hub for Europe. The rebalance has also produced fruitful military partnerships. In 2013, Israel’s air force joined its American, Greek, and Italian counterparts in Israel’s largest-ever multinational air-war training maneuvers. Cancelled joint maneuvers between Israel and Turkey were quickly replaced by exercises between the American, Israeli, and Hellenic navies. Cyprus joined in search-and rescue-exercises in 2014.

Netanyahu, however, always kept the restoration of ties with Turkey as a strategic goal. In 2013, Obama arranged a telephone call between Netanyahu and Erdogan. The Israeli PM apologized “for any errors that could have led to loss of life” in the Mavi Marmara raid. The two leaders came to terms on compensation. Erdogan walked back comments criticizing Israel and agreed not to prosecute Israeli officials for their part in the incident. And Netanyahu won on his major strategic concern: The Gaza blockade would remain firmly in place.

Ultimately a bumbling Turkey, not Israel, would become isolated. In 2016, Turkish officials looking for a new source of natural gas in the wake of tensions with Russia sat down to talks with the Israelis. On June 29, Israel approved the reconciliation agreement. Israel agreed to pay $20 million to the families of those killed on the Mavi Marmara. The renewed ties have weathered their first challenge, as Erdogan passed on an opportunity to implicate Israel in the recent failed coup in Turkey.

Not surprisingly, Netanyahu received bitter criticism about the deal. “Netanyahu cares for Gaza and not for our soldiers,” said Zahava Shaul, whose son Oron was killed in Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, his body still held by Hamas. “Netanyahu has not kept his promises.” He had a particularly rough time with politicians on his right. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said that the deal would have “bad consequences.” Education Minister Naftali Bennett said the deal harms Israel’s resilience and national honor.

Netanyahu, knowing such attacks would come, maintained that it was in Israel’s strategic interest to resume ties with a powerful Muslim state from a position of strength. He took the long view and never wavered.

Sunni Neighbors

Despite the conflagrations in the region, Israel’s ties with Sunni Arab states have generally grown stronger with Netanyahu in office. Shared concerns over Iran’s nuclear program and growing strength have paved the way for quiet but effective cooperation.

In Saudi Arabia, Iran’s most potent Arab foe, Israel sees a counterweight. Jerusalem has therefore offered greater leeway to the Saudis on various defense and strategic matters. In 2011, Israel gave the green light to Germany for the sale of Leopard 2 tanks to Riyadh. And when Egypt wanted to hand over the strategic Red Sea islands of Tiran and the Sanafir Islands to Saudi Arabia, Israel registered no objection, noting that it had received written assurances from Riyadh that its freedom of passage would be guaranteed. In July, a retired Saudi general and ex-government adviser visited Israel publicly and met with Knesset members and senior Foreign Ministry officials.

Since the Israeli victory in the Second Intifada, Palestinians outside of Gaza have not been able to threaten the State of Israel in any serious way.

Israel’s relations with Sissi’s Egypt have similarly grown warmer, after the brief but dangerous rule of Mohammed Morsi. Israel’s Deputy Chief of Staff Yair Golan has in fact called recent intelligence cooperation between the two countries “unprecedented.” In 2011 and 2013, Netanyahu assented to an increase in Egyptian troops in the Sinai to combat jihadist forces. When Egyptian jets violated Israeli airspace in 2015, defense officials dismissed it as “minor.” For the first time ever, Egypt voted for Israel at the UN, supporting its membership in a committee on outer space. Cairo returned its envoy to Israel in February 2016, filling a vacancy that had lingered since 2012 when an Israeli airstrike killed top Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari at the outset of Operation Pillar of Defense. In July 2016, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry came to Israel for a rare and cordial public visit and even watched the Euro soccer final with Netanyahu.

Israel’s security and economic relationship with its eastern neighbor, Jordan, has continued on relatively sure footing. In December 2015, the two countries unveiled an $800 million plan to build a canal to save the Dead Sea. A month earlier, Israel’s Interior Ministry initiated a program to bring 1,500 Jordanian citizens to work in hotels in Eilat. Israel’s gas finds have also led to economic cooperation. In April 2015, Netanyahu approved a 15-year, $500 million natural-gas deal with Jordan, though lawmakers in Amman are working to get the deal cancelled.

Israeli and Jordanian pilots trained together over Alaska during a military exercise in the summer of 2015. Israel also gave Jordanian military 16 Cobra helicopters to help in its fight against the Islamic State. And the two countries maintain close intelligence ties, especially regarding terrorist groups in Syria.

It’s worth noting that in late 2015, Israel announced plans to open a diplomatic office in a renewable-energy agency in the United Arab Emirates, Israel’s first diplomatic presence in the Persian Gulf region since 2000.

 Africa

In July 2016, Netanyahu returned from a resoundingly successful tour of Africa. The trip highlighted growing relationships that had previously passed below the media radar. Netanyahu walked away from the trip with real accomplishments. Ethiopia and Kenya publicly supported restoring Israel’s observer status at the African Union, which had ended in 2002. Muslim-majority Guinea renewed ties with Israel that had been suspended since 1967. Finally, Tanzania said it planned to open an embassy in Israel.

In strengthening these ties, Netanyahu sees an opportunity to gain allies and shatter the Palestinians’ automatic majority in international fora. “It might take a decade, but we will change the automatic majority against Israel. That’s something that has never been possible in the past,” he said. A lofty goal, perhaps even too ambitious, but it shows his interest in original solutions in dealing with the Palestinians.

Palestinians

A long-term peace deal with the Palestinians is simply not in the offing. Until Palestinian leadership has more to gain from recognizing Israel’s right to exist than it does from claiming victimhood, a lasting peaceful solution is a dream. Thus the problem remains unsolved, with all that entails: rockets, terrorism, lawfare, and international condemnation.

On the other hand, since the Israeli victory in the Second Intifada, Palestinians outside of Gaza have not been able to threaten the State of Israel in any serious way. Periodic outbreaks of violence (some recently in the West Bank) inevitably lead commentators to warn that the third intifada has arrived, but these episodes fail to gain widespread support. Nor do the attacks change anything for the Palestinians. As ghastly as all the attacks are, they are strategically ineffective.

The Palestinian Authority’s major effort against Israel has taken place in international bodies, and while this causes headaches, it has failed to change anything on the ground. Initiatives hailed as game changers have raised expectations without much to show for it. The Palestinian plan to gain full recognition as a UN member state, for example, ran into opposition from Western leaders, and stalled. PA President Mahmoud Abbas succeeded in gaining recognition only as a non-member observer state. The “diplomatic tsunami” Israel was supposed to face never materialized.

The PA continues to try to get a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw from the West Bank, but the United States has proven reliable in threatening a veto. In December 2014, when a vote came up, two of the 15 UNSC members voted no and another five abstained—preempting a U.S. veto entirely. Abbas’s UN speech in September 2015, in which he promised to drop a “bombshell,” contained nothing of the sort. As usual, he warned that the Palestinians would withdraw from agreements with Israel and declared that Palestine was a state under occupation. In April of that year, the PA made good on its threat to join the International Criminal Court, but even Palestinians understood there would be no action against Israel. “I don’t want to disappoint our people, but the ICC procedures are slow and long and might face lots of obstacles and challenges and might take years,” said PA Foreign Minister Riad Malki. In the meantime, Abbas’s approval plummeted; it reached 16 percent in 2015.

Palestinians have lost faith in their national movement. Young Palestinians who attack Israelis “are battling … the growing Palestinian realization that their national movement has no answers, no narrative or political vision that offers a way forward to better days,” writes the Times of Israel’s Haviv Rettig Gur. “These young killers are striving, in their kamikaze fervor, to rekindle the idea among Palestinians that straightforward victory remains possible, if only because the alternative—the possibility that Israel cannot be dislodged, that the nostalgic vision of an undivided, unfettered Palestine cannot be reclaimed—is simply too monstrous to accept.”

But in Gaza, the menace of Hamas continues to grow even in the face of Israeli operations meant to damage the group and restore deterrence. The organization’s willingness to fight Israel every few years shows that Israel has not been able to deter it for long. What’s more, Hamas comes back improved in every round. It has developed the Nuhba Force, several thousand strong, to carry out raids through tunnel networks into Israeli territory. In 2014, Hamas forces killed 66 soldiers during Operation Protective Edge. It even managed to shut down international traffic into Ben Gurion Airport for a day. The range of Hamas’s rockets is expanding, and now it’s able to threaten Tel Aviv and Jerusalem almost at will.

Iran

Hamas isn’t the only threat that Netanyahu has failed to stymie. Despite years of effort, he was powerless to prevent the P5+1 powers from concluding an Iranian nuclear deal in 2015. Netanyahu was the most vocal world leader opposing the deal, and he was willing to let the already cold relationship with Obama get worse as he pressed his case. He made a series of high-profile speeches condemning the deal, including a controversial March 2015 address to a joint meeting in Congress, against the wishes of the White House and most of the Democratic Party. It was all to no avail.

There were some bright spots in the campaign against Iran. Somebody—many think the Israelis—orchestrated a series of assassinations against Iranian nuclear scientists. The Stuxnet computer virus, allegedly jointly developed by Israel and the United States, wreaked havoc on Iranian computers at the Natanz uranium facility in 2009 and 2010.

Yet, the dangerous deal is now a reality. Since it was reached, Iran has enjoyed the release of billions of dollars in frozen assets, encouraged by the United States. America is even buying millions of dollars’ worth of heavy water from Iran. The country’s nuclear program remains a threat.

W
ith two major exceptions, Hamas and Iran, Israel has been on a successful foreign-policy streak under Netanyahu. How has it managed to navigate flotillas, wars on its borders, tensions with powerful former allies, and terrorist threats? For one, its leadership has shown patience—something not traditionally seen as an Israeli strength. Decision-makers have not run after solutions that aren’t there. They have been comfortable letting situations emerge, showing a confidence that policy will be flexible enough to change with events. Netanyahu didn’t panic over Erdogan’s newfound hostility. He was willing to suffer insults while keeping the door open for Turkey’s return. And when the time came, Netanyahu showed diplomatic finesse.

Netanyahu has also managed to analyze complex situations and determine the country’s interests. Israel wisely chose not to pick a side between Assad and the rebels. The willingness to risk working with rebel groups on its borders and provide humanitarian aid served the country well.

Israelis are frustrated by the lack of clear military victories in Gaza. But Netanyahu has not sought to invent a solution that doesn’t exist.

At the same time, Israeli policy has been firm. Netanyahu was willing to strike deep inside Syria and Lebanon to keep weapons out of Hezbollah’s hands. Rebel groups on the Golan know that if they begin attacking Israel, they will face a painful response.

What, then, about Hamas and Iran? What do these problems tell us about Netanyahu’s decisions? Though often portrayed as a warmonger, Netanyahu is extremely cautious around military campaigns. Netanyahu, recall, did whatever he could to avoid a ground incursion in Gaza in 2012. After eight days of bombing, he made significant concessions to Hamas in order to end the flare-up instead of deploying ground troops. He also sought repeated cease-fires before ordering a ground invasion in 2014. And despite massive support for an expanded push into Gaza, Netanyahu made do with a limited incursion to deal with Hamas’s tunnel network. If anything, his approach to Hamas reveals an excess of caution, not zealousness.

In dealing with Hamas, he has also shown some of the other traits mentioned above—patience, for example. The Palestinian Authority isn’t coming back any time soon, and Hamas is an entity Israel knows how to pressure. Remove Hamas and you would get the chaos of rival Islamist groups. Whether this approach is wise remains debatable. Israelis are frustrated by the lack of clear victories in Gaza. And allowing the problem to fester has made the threat worse. But, still, Netanyahu has not sought to invent a solution that doesn’t exist. Israel has maintained its blockade and even strengthened it with Egyptian support.

On Iran, Netanyahu unquestionably failed to achieve his desired outcome. Again, perhaps he was too cautious about taking action to disable Iran’s nuclear program. In any event, Obama was determined to reach a deal. So why did Netanyahu come to Washington and criticize Obama’s unstoppable policy before the U.S. Congress? As critics have noted, the speech risked alienating Democrats and damaged whatever trust remained between him and Obama. But from Netanyahu’s perspective, the vocal effort against the nuclear deal cost him little that wasn’t already lost. He angered congressional Democrats who weren’t well-disposed to him in the first place, and Obama had already decided that Netanyahu was part of the problem.

Netanyahu’s campaign against the Iran deal did reap some benefits. He showed Israelis he was willing to stand up to Obama, whom they came to see as insensitive to their concerns. Millions of Americans saw him on TV eloquently making his case in front of hundreds of applauding congressmen. And he gained credibility among Sunni Arab partners who were equally concerned about Iran’s nuclear program.

Like any leader, Netanyahu makes some decisions for domestic political gain and some for reasons that are hard to discern at all. But critics fail to appreciate the complexity of the challenges facing Israel, and how it is forced to quickly adapt to changes that render existing assumptions meaningless. Under Netanyahu, Israel has managed to stay out of wars that sucked others in, improve its diplomatic position while isolating rivals, remain flexible on policies but firm on red lines, and keep its residents safe. In the Middle East, and increasingly beyond, these are no small accomplishments.